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OpenOffice.org 3 Edges Towards Release

Serdar Yegulalp writes on Information Week, OpenOffice.org's first release candidate
for version 3.0 hit the tubes yesterday. It's an evolutionary, rather
than revolutionary, edition of the open source office suite. It isn't
to OO.o 2 what, say, Office 2007 was to Office 2003 -- but it's solid,
and most importantly, noticeably faster. If there was one complaint I heard about OO.o more than any other,
it was "It's too slow!" Slow to get started, mainly, but actually not
all that slow when doing other things (at least not in my experience).
On Windows, RC1 of version 3 opens all of its apps pretty snappily even
without the Quickstarter running in the system tray. A well-engineered
program shouldn't need a crutch like the Quickstarter in the first
place, so I disabled it to see how well things worked without it.

Another major addition is native (if not feature-complete) support for Microsoft Office macros,
something enormously useful to people trying to make a jailbreak from
the Office but find they can't due to the need to support legacy
macros. Financial houses and law firms seem to be two types of folks
most heavily dependent on Office VB macros -- so maybe some success
stories from their side of the fence will compel those with far less
ambitious needs to make the jump, too.